NASA MAKING ITS MOON MISSION COMMERCIAL COULD SIGNAL A PARADIGM SHIFT FOR DEEP-SPACE TRAVEL

Dhyann

[p][span style="font-weight: bold;"]NASA [/span]is now mulling over the idea of using commercial rockets to launch a critical mission around the Moon next year instead of using the massive rocket that the agency has been building for the last decade. Such a drastic change would not only upend flight plans for this particular mission, but it could also have big implications on how ambitious space travel programs are conducted in the future.

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[p]The impetus for this new commercial focus is to maintain the agency’s launch schedule. NASA’s rocket, the Space Launch System, or SLS, is taking much longer to make than expected and probably won’t be ready to fly by its current target launch date of June 2020, whereas other commercial vehicles already on the market are ready to fly right now.

[p id="rl6SyN"]Making this revision would not be a simple swap. NASA would need not one commercial rocket but two in order to make the mission happen. The agency will also need to develop new technologies and figure out how to piece together certain vehicles in space in order to ensure that its mission can actually make it all the way out to the Moon.

[p]It’s a process that will take a lot of time and effort, and there’s no guarantee that it can be done by next year. But if NASA can pull off this monumental shift to commercial vehicles, the agency may just demonstrate a new method of deep-space travel that relies on multiple launches of smaller vehicles and doesn’t necessarily require massive rockets to succeed. That could ultimately save NASA lots of time and money, freeing up funds to do more ambitious things.

[h2 id="0i7xii"][strong]SPACE TUGS[/strong][/h2][div] [strong][br][/strong][/div][div][strong]F[/strong][span aria-labelledby="word-first--1" role="text"][span aria-hidden="true" role="presentation"]or[/span][/span] this upcoming mission, NASA wants to send two heavy spacecraft out on a three-week trip around the Moon next year: an empty crew capsule called Orion and a piece of cylindrical hardware that provides power and support to the capsule called the European Service Module. Together, the two vehicles need a lot of fuel to break free of Earth’s gravity and reach the extreme distance of the Moon. The SLS is so powerful that it will be capable of sending the pair all the way out to that distance in just one launch.[/div][p id="cYR7TS"]But if NASA decides to fly commercial, there isn’t a vehicle available right now that’s powerful enough to send both Orion and its module together to the Moon’s vicinity. The two most powerful commercial rockets in the US include SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and the Delta IV Heavy from the United Launch Alliance. While both are impressive vehicles, neither can match what the SLS will do when it’s complete.

[p id="cYR7TS"]That’s why two rockets would be needed. One rocket would launch Orion and the European Service Module together into Earth’s orbit where they would essentially stay “parked” for a bit. Another rocket would then launch what is known as a space tug, which is essentially another rocket with its own fuel and engine attached. The tug and Orion would hook up together in orbit, and the tug’s engine would ignite, propelling the vehicles all the way to the Moon. “It’s much like a tractor on a farm that pulls trailers or farm equipment,” Dallas Bienhoff, founder of the Cislunar Space Development Company, which focuses on building out deep-space infrastructure, tells [span style="font-style: italic;"]Us![/span]. “It’s a propulsion unit.”  [br]

[p]This concept of using space tugs for deep-space travel has been touted for decades. NASA began studying the concept in the 1960s and ‘70s, with one NASA official describing them as needed for “imparting velocities to other bodies in space.” Ultimately, the upper portions of rockets can be considered space tugs, as these vehicles push payloads to their intended orbits. However, space tugs can be launched on their own, remaining in space in order to attach to other vehicles and propel them where they need to go.

[p]Space tugs could change how NASA has been doing its deep-space human missions for decades. “One of the issues that we have as a space industry, which has led us to the Space Launch System, is we insist on putting all of the mass per mission on a single launch,” says Bienhoff, who also researched technologies needed for space tugs at Boeing. Launching all of your hardware this way can get cumbersome. Earth’s gravitational pull is pretty strong, so sending heavy equipment far away from our planet requires a lot of extra power, and, in turn, a lot of extra fuel. Getting all of that fuel into space requires a big rocket, and the bigger your rocket gets, the more fuel you need to lift both the rocket and the payload off of Earth. So the cycle goes, with larger and larger amounts of cargo requiring bigger rockets for deep space.

[h2 id="imFHka"][strong]IN-SPACE ASSEMBLY[/strong][/h2][div] [strong][br][/strong][/div][div][strong]O[/strong][span aria-labelledby="word-first--2" role="text"][span aria-hidden="true" role="presentation"]f[/span][/span] course, another capability that’s needed for all of this to work is a way to dock with these tugs. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has acknowledged that the crew capsule Orion, as it’s designed now, does not have the capability to rendezvous and dock with a tug. “Between now and June of 2020, we would have to make that a reality,” he said during a Senate hearing, referring to docking.[/div][p]However, this kind of in-space docking is not a novel practice. Russia’s Soyuz capsule has long been automatically docking with the International Space Station, bringing crews to the orbiting lab. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon also just demonstrated its ability to dock with the ISS on a recent test flight without crew input, using a suite of sensors and lasers to come in close and gently ram itself onto a port on the outside of the station. “The LIDAR and machine vision systems that are used for Crew Dragon to autonomously dock with station are some of the sensors you might use to do manufacturing and assembly in space,” Andrew Rush, CEO and president of Made In Space, a company developing ways to 3D print and build in space, tells [span style="font-style: italic;"]Us[/span].  [br]

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dr.gautam

good share

sakhr68

Nice share brother